The Rise of Multi Channel Customer Service and The Death of the Call Centre

The past decade has been an uneasy time for call centres, as they have had to adapt to changing customer attitudes.

People don't want to pick up the phone to hear the hiss of background noise and an uninterested call agent. Instead, they prefer to use alternative service channels. Does this show the end of the call center as we know it?

The Demise of Call Centres

Nowadays, only having a call centre which answers the phones is not enough. Due to consumer demand, more and more companies are providing multiple methods of contacting them. Call centres need to provide services that meet their customer's changing communication needs or risk losing them.

Transform Your Call Center into a Contact Center

Phone calls are by far the most popular channel, taking up roughly half of customer interactions in the industry.

Although not as popular as they once were, they still are the main point of contact for customers but represent a shrinking market.

By transforming into a contact centre, you can avoid biting the dust.

Four call center employees on the phones transform into contact center employees taking not only calls but other customer service channels, followed by the text 'Turn your call center into a contact center.'

Here are the most popular service channels you can adopt:

Email

With almost everyone having an email address, this service channel is very popular.

People like to write things to get their full thoughts out, so this channel helps customers do this.

Your customer forwards each email query directly to your team, where they can then help.

Live Chat

Each website is tailored to be user-friendly, and some of them have a live chat widget implemented on the site.

Often the first interaction a customer has with a company happens here, so it is important to utilise it.

Working in a similar way to emails, customers like that their queries are responded to faster.

Social Media

Since social media is so popular, having a presence on the major platforms is a must.

Be in on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram - customer queries are visible to the public, and so are the answers. This public aspect helps you deal with customer queries while at the same time broadcasting to a broader audience, which helps raise the profile of your company.

This broadcasting is also where you need to be wary.

As people on the platform can see when someone is complaining, you need to ensure that staff working within these channels have the correct training to deal with queries promptly.

You also need to implement a monitoring system to identify any negative patterns occurring, so problems can be dealt with before they become major issues.

Mail/Letters

Even though most interactions are carried out online, some people still prefer to write a letter.

Letters are still going strong as a popular channel, and thankfully, dealing with them isn't that difficult. You can treat them in the same way as emails or live chats, but just in physical form.

The downside to letters is that they take a lot longer for each interaction to happen as letters have to be posted between the company and the customer.

Sending letters can now be done over the internet using services like Docmail.

Three people able to provide customer service via calls, email, chats, social media and letters.

Things to Consider

There are things you need to consider before you transform your call centre into a contact centre.

Make Sure Correct Training is Given

To ensure a fantastic service is given across all of these channels, appropriate training is needed.

Each channel requires a different skill set. You wouldn't put an agent on the phones without them knowing what to do, so why do any different with the other channels?

Consider The Style Needed

Each channel will have a different style to them. The way an agent would respond to interactions on a live chat would be different to how they would respond via email. You should make sure your agents can adapt to whichever channel they are working with, and on-going training can help.

Why You Should Transform Into a Contact Center

With these alternative channels constantly taking a bigger share of the customer service market, there are good reasons why you should start using most, if not all of them.

Almost all of us have had at least one terrible experience over the phone with a call center.

The internet has provided people with other ways to interact with businesses, and this means that picking up the phone is now not a necessity, but one of many options, so having multiple possible ways to contact you is a must.

When given a choice, people may pick a different channel to a call centre because they much prefer it to having to talk to an agent.

It's an Opportunity to Grow

Using the most popular customer service channels will help you grow your business.

To fully benefit from using multiple channels you can integrate feedback and evaluate all communications using Cxceed, and be ready to meet customer demands no matter how they contact you.

The Wrap-Up

Since half of the customer interactions in the industry happen through other channels, not only through phone calls, call centres can't afford to miss out.

Start using a multi-channel customer service model and a quality assurance system to perfect your staff's skills and provide an excellent service through every channel.

Transform your call centre, bring it up to date, and increase your profit.

If you use a multi-channel model, let us know how it is for you, down below!

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Uncategorized - 08/13/2019

Why Do Call Agents Talk So Loudly On The Phone?

Why Are Call Agents Always Talking Loudly?

Call centre agents seem to love talking loudly when on the phone. The call centre noise is unbelievably loud sometimes. Like, REALLY loud, to the point where it's actually quite difficult to understand what they're saying. This background noise makes it so obvious it's a call agent when they phone you.

Call Centres are Noisy Places

Surely the microphone is next to their mouth, so why can't they talk at a reasonable volume allowing me to understand them? Instead, I feel like I'm fourteen again, and my Mum is telling me off for drinking straight out of the milk bottle. (We've all done that, right?)

Call centres are usually loud places, with a lot of background noise: people talking, phones ringing, printers going, music playing, bosses shouting, kettles whistling - you get the idea. The noise soon builds up. In any situation, when you can't hear another person, you automatically assume that they also can't hear you. It's human nature to raise your voice when you can't hear someone.

Nightclub, and you can't hear your friend? You shout.

Building site, and you can't hear your boss? You shout.

Call center, and you can't hear the caller? You shout, but you don't need to.

Even though the call centre has a lot of background noise and the agent can't hear the caller very well, the person on the other end often can her the agent perfectly. Yes, they have a headset with a noise-canceling microphone, but that doesn't stop the average call centre agent shouting down the phone!

It's Human Nature

We are in a loud environment, so we speak louder than normal. It's something which we haven't evolved out of. It's not surprising that they can't hear the customer on the other end of the line very well with all the chaos going on around them.

How can they even concentrate with all that noise going on?! One person talks loudly, so the person next to them feels the needs to raise their voice to be heard, and then the next, and the next. This results in the customer getting shouted at down the line, and a horrible overall customer experience.

It's a bit like when you're speaking to someone in a foreign country. Because you can't understand the person very well, you start talking louder and slower, sometimes slipping into an awful accent to try and be understood. Just like in the call centre, they don't mean to do it, it just happens.

How Do You Reduce Background Noise in an Office?

1. Get Everyone To Maintain Their Voice Levels

As obvious as it sounds, asking people not to shout is a simple method to reducing background noise. It is straightforward and it can be very effective.

Sometimes people don't realise they are talking loudly, so making them aware of it can often result in them lowering their voice to a more suitable level for the office they are in. If one person isn't shouting, then the person next to them doesn't need to and so on.

2. No Chit-Chat Behind Someone's Desk

Another simple idea is asking agents not to talk to colleagues behind another agents desk when they are on a call. Going to a quiet corner where no-one is working, or moving to another room altogether will bring noise levels down and make it easier for agents to hear the caller.

3. Acoustic Foam

Sound masking! By installing acoustic foam around the office can help to dampen the noise without dampening the mood. It's relatively inexpensive to buy and install but will make a big difference by stopping echo and noise bouncing around the room. This is a common sound masking system that is very effective.

4. Use Chat Systems

The use of a chat system for agents can come in handy, so they don't have to shout across the room to one another; they can silently type it. It is a good idea to monitor, however, to make sure people aren't just gossiping all day instead of working.

5. Partition Screens

Another way of sound masking is by installing partition screens can help to reduce noise. Not only that, but it also gives agents a little more privacy and even a place to pin things. It's three for the price of one - we are treating you today!

6. Noise-Cancelling Headsets

Using equipment like headsets which have two headphone cups can allow agents to hear the caller much easier while blocking out background noise surrounding them. Most good call centres use headsets with noise-cancelling microphones, so the caller shouldn't hear the commotion happening in the rest of the call center.

7. White Noise Machines

By installing white noise generators, you can create artificial levels of noise, which can help mask the jungle-like sounds of a call center. Staff will be able to understand customers much clearer not being distracted, helping to reduce mistakes. Of course, as mentioned there are other sound masking options, but this is one of the cheapest.

8. Don't Have Noisy Machines Next To Agents

Sure, we need printers and servers, but do they need to be next to the agents? No. Instead, have a separate room for these loud machines. Sure, you'll have to walk for an extra 10 seconds, but I'm sure not having a machine buzzing and beeping in an agent's ear will be worth it.

Don't forget, there are actually regulations surrounding the noise levels your agents are surrounded by. Make sure you're complying with them!

The Wrap-Up

So call agents often talk very loudly on a call, but it isn't always their own fault as background noise builds up or just human nature taking over.

Reducing the noise in a call centre will help the agent hear the call more clearly, and often they will not feel the need to shout to get their point across, creating a much more pleasant experience for everyone. If they're happier (and quieter!), they can provide customers with a better experience (and with Cxceed helping out, they'll be unstoppable!).Everyone's a winner!

We hope these tips help and if you have any more, or have used any of the ones discussed, leave us a comment telling us how you got on.

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Uncategorized - 08/08/2019

CX Strategy - Go Big or Go Home

A warning to you business owners out there - clients today are less likely to stay loyal to you and your services because of three things:

There's more competition than ever before.
Customer expectations are drastically rising.
Information about competitors is accessible within a click of a button.

These make retaining clients a considerable challenge and the creation of a customer experience (CX) strategy a must.

A 2011 customer service impact report showed that up to 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.

Customers today are quick in their decision to switch a supplier after having a bad experience, often posting about it on social media which can affect businesses.

Word quickly spreads online, and one dissatisfied customer could influence potential ones who read and take the negative reviews as fact (even if it isn't).

If you are worried about negative reviews or have been subject to them, don't worry! We've written a guide on how you can deal with them!

Not only that, current customers often have second thoughts after reading the bad experiences and decide to go elsewhere. Don't worry though, there's good news! A well-designed CX strategy can help us use social media and new technology to our advantage.

Don't get left behind the pack - find out how you can adapt your service to meet your clients' ever-changing needs and have them coming back for more!

Customers Have The Power

The internet has allowed clients quick and easy access to information, giving them a voice and a choice. As a result, they know they have alternative options, and expect excellent service from companies. A good CX strategy should consistently provide an outstanding customer experience to make them happy.

It's no use only having a competent complaints department; each employee who speaks to a customer should be excellent (and you hopefully won't even need a complaints department). Customers posting negatively on social media is an indication that your strategy has failed, but what is that they expect from a brand?

A survey commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive, showed that 73% of customers appreciate contact center agents’ friendliness, which is at the heart of the customer satisfaction strategy.

More than half (55%) of surveyed users demand easy access to information and support which makes businesses offer a multi-channel service, social media visibility, and high response rate.

Finally, 36% said a personalised experience with useful updates was a thing they cherished. Businesses need to understand and interact with individual customers in personalised ways, at scale.

In a nutshell, to be successful, the supplier must deliver timely, contextual, relevant and personalised information or knowledge to every customer across every engagement channel.

This isn't easy to do, but it is achievable.

Don't Sit Back - Take Risks

The world evolves too fast for anyone who is unwilling to take risks and try new approaches. Below is a simple framework that serves as a guide into the creation of a new CX Strategy.

Face Your Flaws

We all think we know our business like the back of our hand, but some things are not always as we think they are.

To find out where your team is falling short, reach out to your customers, ask them what they are happy with and crucially what they are unhappy with. Use these conversations and the data collected from them to understand which business processes are working and which are not.

Focus on the processes that frustrate your customers the most and start to make improvements to those areas. Along with getting familiar with your clients’ sentiment, we’d suggest also looking at your staff’s.

Our experience has taught us there's a strong connection between employee motivation and customer retention with your brand, as the phrase “happy staff – happy customers,” suggests. So talking with your staff before you figure out the processes that need improvement is an excellent idea to put into practice.

Gain a Culture For Growth

What do we mean when we talk about culture?

For a start, our company’s values direct the decisions our employees make. It's crucial that every single person from top to bottom pulls in the same direction, guided by the same core values.

We want to make sure our customers have the best experience possible, and we do this by making sure client satisfaction is at the highest it can be. Our manager's role is to set an example, and coach every team member to apply this culture to their daily tasks.

Metrics Make Your Life Easier

You can't improve what you don’t measure. To avoid getting bogged down with too much information, pick the most important metrics for your business to monitor and develop actions for change.

We've previously spoken about how to use metrics as improvement tactic indicators, as well as the most common downfalls companies have with them, so we won't go fully into it here. The critical take-out point is to use the metric's results as improvement tactic indicators.

Provide Support, Everywhere

Customers today contact you through multiple channels such as e-mail, chat, phone, or video-call, and expect the information they provide on one channel to be immediately available to staff working on the other channels.

As the number of touch points rises, companies face the challenge to deliver consistent service across them all. A failure to provide it often results in augmented AHT, low FCR rates, poor CSAT scores, and the business starts to suffer.

Omni-channel support has always been challenging to achieve, but recent technology is enabling companies to automate some of the processes and make consistent quality interactions possible.

QA Software is Your Right Hand Man

Manually adding calls and emails is inefficient, so when choosing software for your business, select one with API's that can be easily integrated with your servers or PBX.

In such cases, Cxceed software can help integrate QA into your business processes. Interactions made through multiple channels are gathered, neatly indexed and accessible to you, to evaluate and use for training.

The Wrap-Up

Customers today have more power than ever before. Their expectations are rising, and they are willing to chop and change suppliers until they find one which meets their demands.

Use this guide to create a CX Strategy which suits your business and watch your clients' happiness increase. Don't shy away from it. Be proactive, and give your customers what they want, when they want it.

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Uncategorized - 08/05/2019

Why You NEED To Ditch Performance Appraisals

Performance Appraisals. Love Them or Hate Them?

To some extent, appraisals do work but are usually too far apart and take a significant amount of work to organize. Although the results can be positive, employees worry about them, and if you bring up something negative which wasn't recent, it looks like you are picking on them.

We want our agents to be happier when doing their job, not more stressed and demotivated.

When I was on the receiving end of performance appraisals, I never liked them, and the delay was the biggest problem.

My opinion was if I do something wrong, the sooner you tell me about it, the sooner I can fix it, and if I do something right let know, and I'll do it again.

COME ON, IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!

Imagine if you were training a new kitten or a puppy to do its business outside, or in a litter tray and you waited for three months before you gave them any feedback. You would end up knee-deep in sh**!

With that said, here are five reasons to show that appraisals are hurting your business and not helping it!

The text ‘Houston, we have a problem’ followed by a rocket.

1. Appraisals Take a lot of Work to Organise!

Oh spreadsheets, how much I hate them. I've wasted so much time preparing appraisals because of them; time which could have been spent coaching and improving the performance of my team.

Not only spreadsheets but finding all of the data which I needed to show to my staff. The examples of good calls, bad calls, the complaints, the positive comments and drafting out how they could improve. It was hell preparing for them.

For the fast-paced businesses out there, appraisals can be rushed and done ineffectively. You might as well have not bothered at all!

Think about the process you have to do to perform appraisals: Analyse the employee's performance, look at their data, complete the forms, hold the meeting and take time out of everyone's day. It's believed performance appraisals take up around 2 million hours a year.

Can you really afford to spend this much time? I'd rather do it more effectively, and quicker!

2. Staff Leave Before They Get to Their First Appraisal

High staff turnover is a harsh fact for almost all call centres. Some agents leave before they even get to their first performance appraisal, wasting the money spent training them.

Why does this happen?

Lots of reasons, but one is that everybody wants to be told 'well done' once in a while. Waiting months for an appraisal to acknowledge an individual's efforts is madness and can leave some new hires with the impression that you don’t care about what they are doing.

This delayed feedback is also something which as a manager, I struggled with. I cared about and valued my staff. I wanted to give them praise, but I didn't have the means to collect the necessary data easily and couldn't spare the time to collect it to give them performance feedback frequently.

3. They Are Not Listening to You

So you've managed to organise all of your data into a spreadsheet for an appraisal. It's now time to get to work. You sit down with an agent for their appraisal and start discussing the mistakes which happened in the past months with them.

The staff member can hardly remember a conversation they had a few hours ago, let alone months ago. Naturally, they feel you're unjust even mentioning them, and get defensive.

When I had to do this, I didn't want to bombard my staff with just negativity, so I tried to explain to them that I just wanted to help them improve, while simultaneously, telling them what was good with their performance - but most didn't believe me and only heard the negatives.

4. Repetition is Habit Forming

If you allow your employees to do the wrong thing repeatedly, then those things will become a habit, which is hard to change. For employees, it often seems easier just to quit, rather than try and change the way they have always done things!

5. Faster Feedback Produces Better Performance

Appraisals are a delayed method of feedback, and immediate feedback is proven to improve performance.

Don't just take my word for it have a read. If you opened that, had a skim and was left scratching your head, here is a slightly less technical article.

6. Appraisals Can Actually Cause Good Employees To Leave

Yes, you read that right. Giving out an appraisal could actually be one of the most anti-productive practices you have in your workplace.

Imagine you've been working as hard as you can for the past year, putting in the extra hours and you feel you've made a real difference. Now imagine your boss comes and seems to focus on the areas you're underperforming in.

Unfortunately, this is the nature of the appraisal for many businesses. "Well done for this, BUT you need to do better in X, Y and Z.

Adobe carried out a study, and found that 52% of workers were negatively surprised by the feedback given, whilst 22% of workers cried after the appraisals. This shouldn't be what appraisals are about; encourage your employees, don't destroy their souls!

7. They're Inconsistent

Since there's no set method for appraisals and can be largely prone to subjectivity, it's going to be impossible to consistently conduct them.

Sure, you can measure them based on sales, or calls made, but that doesn't tell the full story.

If they've made more calls than needed, that doesn't always mean they're a good worker; the quality of those calls may have been nowhere good enough.

On the other hand, they may not have reached their goal due to issues beyond their control. How can you tell someone they're no good when it's not their fault?

Then , of course, there's bias.

Whether you know it or not, you'll be biased towards different employees. Some you will like more than others, it's natural!

But that's not fair on the employees receiving the appraisal, is it? Everyone deserves to be judged on the same performance scale, not how much you like them.

A Never-Ending Cycle

Do you feel like you keep repeating yourself? You hire new staff, some leave before the first appraisal which you've spent a lot of time organising, and after it, a lot more leave. Repeat.

Break Out of It - Upgrade to an Evaluation System that Works!

If you want to break this cycle, you need to ditch the performance appraisal method.

You might then ask, “How would I measure my staffs' performance?”

Good question. You could try some of the available quality assurance software on the market (we tried most of them, and none of them worked), or you can save yourself the hassle and try Cxceed.

What Makes a Good QA System?

First of all, and I can’t stress this enough, a good quality assurance system has to enable frequent evaluations - The more frequent, the better, with daily evaluations being the ideal option.

Why Daily Evaluations?

To repeat my opening words: If I do something wrong, the sooner you tell me about it, the sooner I can fix it.

Look at it this way – it’s an appraisal done daily.

You don’t need to bother with months worth of spreadsheet data, and you don’t wait months to do them. It works even better for the agents. Daily evaluations don’t overwhelm them with mistakes that happened months ago, but rather they are pointed out as soon as they happen.

The Wrap-Up

It's time for call centers and businesses to upgrade their out of date methods to a quality system that will help grow their business.

If you have any experiences with appraisals or evaluation systems that you might want to share, leave a comment down below!

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Uncategorized - 07/12/2019

Tips to Improve Your Call Center Training

Tips to Improve Your Call Centre Training

Customer demands are always changing, and call centres need to modify their training to keep up.

Not doing so can lead to the loss of customers because they encounter a poor customer experience.

Don't get left behind. Browse these top tips on how to improve quality assurance in a call centre to take your customer experience to the next level.

Use a CSAT Call Centre KPI to Indicate What to Review

The clue is in the name 'Call Centre Key Performance Indicators'. These 'indicators' are just that and should be used as a guide only. A lot of call centres tend to misuse KPIs, having a negative impact on their business.Correctly using KPIs will help indicate areas to be targeted for evaluation. You don't know what has upset a customer, so you should never assume a low CSAT means that an agent has done a poor job without investigating it.

A magnifying glass over a decline in a performance graph, followed by the text 'Investigate the root of the problem'

Evaluations Are Where You Identify What Needs Improving

The main purpose of evaluations is to highlight where agents can improve, and call centres should have a scoring system to help analyse the performance of their staff. A poorly designed or non-existent scoring system can contribute to high attrition rates. A well-designed system will help you identify areas an agent needs to improve and provide training and coaching material with the click of a button.

A pie chart divided on four part with a loop symbol in the middle, with each part containing one of 'identify, adapt, learn, improve'.

Self Evaluation Helps

Allowing your staff to self-evaluate their performance helps them to realise and accept their own weaknesses. It also helps lower the barrier people raise when they feel they are being criticized.Self-evaluations can be problematic if not done correctly - what's stopping agents from scoring themselves 100% for each call? It's hard to have agents self-evaluate with honesty; this is something we as a company initially struggled with when trying to get agents to self-evaluate but using Cxceed helped us to overcome this.

A part of a scorecard with a tick box followed by excellent crossed out, followed by a circled handwritten 'I can do better!'.

Have Frequent and Timely Evaluations

Frequent evaluations help identify mistakes as they happen, which together with ongoing training, solve issues before they become bigger. When we switched to daily evaluations, our problems were solved without the pressure of having to deal with numerous issues in one go. Coaching was also given at this point to stop a repetition of the problem. We saw that frequent and timely evaluations had a positive impact on our staff.

Combining These Tips Will Result in an Outstanding Performance Management System!

Combining these techniques will result in a performance management system which runs smoothly and works. A system that agents and managers identify and accept what needs improving is key and it is this working together will result in an improved call center training routine - helping grow your business as a whole.

The Wrap-Up

These are just some of the tips which helped me along the way to improving the training I gave my agents. I hope you find them useful in developing your staff! If you have any tips you want to share, feel free to leave a comment down below.

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Uncategorized - 06/14/2019

How to Reduce Average Handle Time in a Call Center

How to Reduce Average Handle Time in a Call Centre

How to Reduce Average Handle Time in a Call Centre to Increase Productivity and Sales

Average call handle time has been something call centres have always wanted to reduce. So many theories on just how to reduce it, so many “quality assurance practices" to follow, yet barely any of them work. In this post, we’ll get familiar with just what this metric is, and how to reduce average handle time in a call centre, without losing any quality in your service, or staff.

What Is Average Handle Time, and Why Is It a Problem?

Every business attempts to reduce operating costs. Time is money, and the more time each agent spends on a call, the more it costs to run a business. Since the first call centre opened, the struggle to optimize workflow has existed. Different metrics became popular, one of which was reducing the average call handle time (AHT) for each agent.

How to Calculate Average Handle Time

Each business that operates a call centre may define it differently, but the definition we would give is:

“The average time an agent takes to deal with a call and is unavailable to deal with the next one."

Using this definition, the average handle time formula would include the following metrics:

Hold time

The time when an agent places a customer on hold while dealing with internal procedures.

Wrap-up time

The time processing data, or on internal procedures connected to the call.

Talk time

The time the agent and the customer spend talking to each other.

Follow-up in call time

The time dealing with issues related to the original call.

It would not include:

The time the customer spends on the call before the agent answers it.

The time after a customer's transfer to another colleague.

Any time the agent is available to answer another call.

Average handling time (AHT) as a mathematical formula looks something like this:

AHT Original = (Hold Time + Talk Time+ Time on Follow-Up Calls + Wrap-Up Time) / Number of Total Calls

To reduce costs, many managers set a maximum average call handle time for each agent, but does it work?

It is Possible to Reduce AHT But Not by Focusing on The Formula

The irony with average handle time is that focusing on it doesn’t help call centres improve effectiveness; it just increases the number of calls.

“But how is that possible? Almost every call centre uses the formula to reduce its call handling time!” Most call centres have high staff turnover because they use metrics like the AHT formula. When the focus is on the length of the call, agents feel pressured and reduce their call time, but they don’t worry about the quality of the call, nor the customer’s needs.

They focus on finishing that call faster and then starting another. Rushing calls can sometimes lead to unhappy clients being forced to make repeated calls to solve their problem, decreasing client satisfaction rates.

So How Do You Reduce Average Call Handling Time?

We set out to reduce our call handling time, and although we managed it, it was a bit of a journey.

First off, we followed the standard “quality assurance practice" of insisting call agents reduce their Average Call Handling time. We set targets for agents to achieve this.

We had positive results which saw AHT times down and service levels up.

Unfortunately, it also had a detrimental effect on first call resolution, customer satisfaction and advisor satisfaction which were all down. Even worse, the average call handling time went up when we combined calls from customers which were about the same problem.

CAHT = (Hold Time + Talk Time + Time on Follow-Up Calls + Wrap-Up Time) / Number of Calls From Clients About a Different Subject

Starting a consultation process, we talked everything through with our agents and supervisors, encouraging them to give their honest opinions. The conclusion was that to reduce average call handling time; we had to improve our agents' call handling skills.

Our new training mantra became:'Focus on quality and speed will happen naturally.'

Improving call handling skills while keeping your agents happy is not easy to do. We managed it by using Cxceed.

The positive results were:

AHT times down
Service levels up
First call resolution up
Customer satisfaction up
Advisor satisfaction up

An eye test containing a number of call center terms, with eyeglasses focusing on the term call handling skills, followed by the text 'Focus on call handling skills to reduce average handle time'

How to Reduce Average Call Handling Time by Improving Call Handling Skills

How we solved the problem

Most people naturally don't like criticism, and a lot of us build defensive barriers in our minds against perceived attacks. To successfully improve the call handling skills of an agent, first, you need to convince them to change their attitude to feedback. People don’t like someone telling them what they need to improve - Just because it’s called feedback, it doesn’t mean the agent will not regard it as criticism.

The big question is how to remove these barriers.

Start by including staff in the evaluation process, and making the whole process transparent. The transparency builds trust and having your staff self-evaluate their own calls, lowers their defences. It is a simple concept; when employees evaluate their own actions and point out areas they can improve, then they are more receptive to any coaching given.

Cxceed facilitates this effortlessly.

How Exactly Does Improving Call Handling Skills Reduce Average Call Handling Time?

Let's make an analogy here: When teaching a new pupil to drive, the instructor doesn't start by teaching them to drive fast. That would be reckless. Instead, they concentrate on ensuring that the learner builds up the right skills to deal with any situation that they might encounter on the road. Driving at speed is something that develops later.

Reducing average call handling time works the same way. Agents will start by doing great calls, and with time, they will get faster, and the average time of these calls will reduce.

We hope you found this helpful. If you have any tips you want to share or have something else to add, feel free to leave a comment down below!

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Uncategorized - 03/14/2019

Businesses are built on conversations.

Improve yours.

Find out how

The Rise of Multi Channel Customer Service and The Death of the Call Centre

The Rise of Multi Channel Customer Service and The Death of the Call Centre

The Demise of Call Centres

Transform Your Call Center into a Contact Center

Email

Live Chat

Social Media

Mail/Letters

Things to Consider

Make Sure Correct Training is Given

Consider The Style Needed

Why You Should Transform Into a Contact Center

It's an Opportunity to Grow

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Why Do Call Agents Talk So Loudly On The Phone?

Why Are Call Agents Always Talking Loudly?

Call Centres are Noisy Places

It's Human Nature

How Do You Reduce Background Noise in an Office?

1. Get Everyone To Maintain Their Voice Levels

2. No Chit-Chat Behind Someone's Desk

3. Acoustic Foam

4. Use Chat Systems

5. Partition Screens

6. Noise-Cancelling Headsets

7. White Noise Machines

8. Don't Have Noisy Machines Next To Agents

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CX Strategy - Go Big or Go Home

CX Strategy - Go Big or Go Home

Customers Have The Power

Don't Sit Back - Take Risks

Face Your Flaws

Gain a Culture For Growth

Metrics Make Your Life Easier

Provide Support, Everywhere

QA Software is Your Right Hand Man

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Why You NEED To Ditch Performance Appraisals

Why You NEED To Ditch Performance Appraisals

COME ON, IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!

1. Appraisals Take a lot of Work to Organise!

2. Staff Leave Before They Get to Their First Appraisal

3. They Are Not Listening to You

4. Repetition is Habit Forming

5. Faster Feedback Produces Better Performance

6. Appraisals Can Actually Cause Good Employees To Leave

7. They're Inconsistent

A Never-Ending Cycle

Break Out of It - Upgrade to an Evaluation System that Works!

What Makes a Good QA System?

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Tips to Improve Your Call Centre Training

Tips to Improve Your Call Centre Training

Use a CSAT Call Centre KPI to Indicate What to Review

Evaluations Are Where You Identify What Needs Improving

Self Evaluation Helps

Have Frequent and Timely Evaluations

Combining These Tips Will Result in an Outstanding Performance Management System!

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How to Reduce Average Handle Time in a Call Centre

How to Reduce Average Handle Time in a Call Centre to Increase Productivity and Sales

What Is Average Handle Time, and Why Is It a Problem?

How to Calculate Average Handle Time

Hold time

Wrap-up time

Talk time

Follow-up in call time

It is Possible to Reduce AHT But Not by Focusing on The Formula

So How Do You Reduce Average Call Handling Time?

How to Reduce Average Call Handling Time by Improving Call Handling Skills

How Exactly Does Improving Call Handling Skills Reduce Average Call Handling Time?